Watching South Korean TV Won't Make You Want to Have a Baby
South Korea is in the midst of a childbearing catastrophe. Birthrates are dropping below replacement level all over the world, including in the United States, and South Korea has the world's lowest fertility rate, with only 0.75 children born for every woman of childbearing age. (Replacement level is considered 2.1 births per woman.) As a result, if the trend continues, South Korea's population is expected to decline by half by the end of this century.
Why are South Koreans so reluctant to have children? There are the usual explanations: a high cost of living, young people delaying marriage and the stubbornly patriarchal nature of South Korean society — a problem so persistent that it sparked the feminist 4B movement, which contends that women should forgo four activities: dating men, having sex with men, marrying men and having kids. (The Korean prefix that denotes negation is pronounced 'bee.')
If you want to understand how these factors play out in the experience of South Korean women, look to the plots of the most popular K-dramas on TV. The K-drama business is one of the few industries in South Korea where women dominate; according to a 2018 estimate, 90 percent of K-drama writers are women. The popularity of these shows, in part because of their global distribution on Netflix, has given South Korean women a potent venue to tell their stories, and many of these stories can rightly be heard as a cry for help.
On paper, the rights afforded new and expecting mothers in South Korea can sound positively Scandinavian in their generosity — including up to three years of combined paid parental leave and generous government baby bonuses. And the country, which fully shed authoritarian rule only in 1987, is enjoying a period of prosperity and cultural influence. South Korea has the world's most popular boy and girl bands, the world's second-biggest cosmetics export industry and a thriving cultural sector that has produced an Academy Award for best picture ('Parasite') and one of Netflix's most popular shows ('Squid Game').
But women's advancement has been sporadic and unequal, and in practice, few of the benefits ensconced in the law have shifted the country's deeply held beliefs about the pressures and demands of parenthood. Many South Koreans believe parental leave is for wimps. The Korea Herald reported that mothers still have a hard time re-entering the work force and that 'many of the women residing in Seoul whose careers have been interrupted by family-related issues tend to sustain a job for less than two years after returning to work.'
Population collapse is largely a first-world problem. But as the most popular Korean dramas are desperately trying to tell us, you can't fix a first-world problem when crucial areas of your society are still stuck in an outdated mentality about gender roles.
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